alt Hacker NewsYou know how the NHS reduced waiting lists a few years back? If you had waiting lists of say 100 for a surgery, they basically said - the list is maximum 15 people, after that it's whoever books first who gets the surgery. So basically you had to be lucky and be the number 15 on the list once a spot was open.
But! Magically NHS waiting lists got shorter! The government could say this on Question Time on the BBC, woohoo!
I imagine this is the kind of thing that's happening now with petty crime reports.
Claims about certain categories of crime rising or falling in England are usually based on the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which is not based on police reports, but on surveying a random sample of people to see if they have been self-reported victims of various kinds of crime.